What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Erik, I don't talk a lot about V:tes here, but I played it fairly regularly for over 20 years. I have easily spent more time playing V:tes than the entire rest of my 100+ board/card game collection put together. From that perspective, I think you did an amazing job of analyzing V:tes based on one play. I will comment further with respect to your numbered points.

1. The predator/prey aspect makes this one of the all-time great multi-player games. It successfully addresses leader-bashing and kingmaking without directly banning either. The voting element of the game helps break up the rigidity of the predator/prey circle by potentially encouraging odd combinations of players to cooperate in passing or defeating certain votes.

2. Good point about the potential negotiation around blocking. An acting player sometimes provokes a negotiation between his predator and his prey over which of them will try to block the action. And sometimes the acting player might even negotiate with a potential blocker by talking about their current (weak) position in the overall game. Alternatively, the acting player might try to intimidate the potential blocker.

3. The draw system is better than most games, because you immediately replace cards as you play them. This means that a player doesn't necessarily lose momentum as his turn continues, regardless of how many minions he has in play. Certain stronger cards are offset by not allowing for an immediate redraw. And V:tes never needed a four-card limit rule like Magic, because opportunity costs offset the potential for loading up with too many similar cards.

4. I never thought about V:tes in those terms before, but I see your point about the balance between building and fighting.

5. The resource management is brutal in V:tes. If you bring out too many vampires, you are vulnerable, especially to a stealth/bleed deck. But if you horde your resources, you won't have enough vampries to protect you or to perform actions.

Combat in V:tes is daunting for a new player, but eventually you get used to the sequence of the phases of each round of combat. This complexity opens up the game to a very in-depth simulation of combat and offers some interesting tactical decisions.

The imbalance in voting is another important design decision by Garfield. Weenie decks could have ruined this game, except that most of the cheap vampires have zero votes. That gives players an incentive to also play with some expensive vampires, or maybe a mixture of cheap and expensive.

The cards are potentially a mess, because nearly 100% of all V:tes cards ever published are still playable, even in a tournament. But Garfield first published V:tes in 1994, just a year after Magic. So he was still working out some ideas and left a legacy of awkward wording and some corner-case cards. That's potentially a problem for any CCG, with specialized rules on every card, but many games phase older sets out of competitive play as time goes by.

I played JYHAD for a couple of years back when the CCG glut was real. I don’t talk about it because discussing it on a forum where Shellhead is a regular poster is like discussing kung fu in a room where Bruce Lee is casually hanging out.

Anyway, great game, needs a limited format treatment for sure. I don’t have much to add except that this is the only CCG I ever saw where random people at my work bought the cards because they loved the art and the theme. They weren’t goth or game nerds, just normal folks who thought the cards were cool.

Not only does shellhead play my fave CCG of all time, Mythos, but my second fave too. I really need to get off of my ass and play.

My Vampire group in the 90's really struggled with this game, trying to play it with the dinky rulebook that WotC provided with their CCGs at the time. We never encountered another group that played Jyhad, so I doubt we ever grokked the rules as completely as we should have.

Gary Sax wrote: Jesus, Erik, what a post. Front page?

Well, it's just a first-game impression, I don't think it's ready to be published hahaha. I can see the flaws coming in much stronger the next time I play and I must be reminded that, yeah, this is a CCG and decks still cost 50€ each despite the game being dead. But I truly appreciate it, thanks

Shellhead wrote: From that perspective, I think you did an amazing job of analyzing V:tes based on one play. I will comment further with respect to your numbered points.

Thanks a lot Shellhead

The imbalance in voting is another important design decision by Garfield. Weenie decks could have ruined this game, except that most of the cheap vampires have zero votes. That gives players an incentive to also play with some expensive vampires, or maybe a mixture of cheap and expensive.

This is true and my Republic of Rome love doing the talking. I kind of think all decks and players should be able to partake in the negotiation game, even if it's with just one vote and the ocassional political card.

In a sense, I see that the ideal decks for this game would all be aggro-control ones focused on tempo, small advantages and a well-rounded plan than going all-bleed or all-political. Of course, easier said than done.

The cards are potentially a mess, because nearly 100% of all V:tes cards ever published are still playable, even in a tournament. But Garfield first published V:tes in 1994, just a year after Magic. So he was still working out some ideas and left a legacy of awkward wording and some corner-case cards. That's potentially a problem for any CCG, with specialized rules on every card, but many games phase older sets out of competitive play as time goes by.

What struck me was not so much that some of the older cards were a mess, but that so many of the newer cards were, too. It sems like the game is stuck, to use Magic terms, somewhere around Ice Age, with huge text blocks that could be reduced to a few keywords and flavourful little details that add little to the design of the card.

Like, apparently they just realized they can use "wake a vampire" for untap effects instead of whatever this is:



I don't even see a point to all this "it's like untapped but not untapped" nonsense. And that's not even the worst offender. In this game, when you do an action with a vampire, it's tapped. Well, cards apparently remind you of that fact. Or are forced to because the rules are terrible and don't make it part of the cost or because you can "try" to do an action but not do it and then don't become tapped. Seriously, it's such a mess it hurts!

dysjunct wrote: I played JYHAD for a couple of years back when the CCG glut was real. I don’t talk about it because discussing it on a forum where Shellhead is a regular poster is like discussing kung fu in a room where Bruce Lee is casually hanging out.

Hey, if I can discuss it after just one play, I think everyone can!

dysjunct wrote: Anyway, great game, needs a limited format treatment for sure. I don’t have much to add except that this is the only CCG I ever saw where random people at my work bought the cards because they loved the art and the theme. They weren’t goth or game nerds, just normal folks who thought the cards were cool.

Apparently, FFG looked into releasing it as a LCG (Garfield said so in an interview) after the success of Netrunner, but they never went through. I wonder why, though I suspect that being a long, multiplayer-only game with player elimination may have been the big issue.

These are some great posts. I agree with the general impression that V:TES is a great game with poor development. People want to mythologize Garfield to an extent, but I think some of that development problem is there in the base set. The game was recently resurrected, but unfortunately it's player base is too old and too conservative to allow any changes that would substantively improve the game. I think to really be successful and worth playing again, it would need a clean reboot that would take care of some of the bloated text and severe balance issues.

What really bothers me, is that although the card pool is huge, there aren't really that many viable deck types in a competitive scene. Some of the disciplines (the vampire powers) are just too good and too efficient to choose other things. So where the game really thrives is not in a competitive but in a creative space. When I had a regular group, people would bring new decks each week and tweak and experiment with concepts to try and make them work. Not to win and dominate and take home the trophy, but to hold their own. It was extremely fun to play around in the design space and the politics of the game without getting too hung up on meta or balance or anything like that. I've bemoaned the fact before, but our group suddenly changed when a new player started and it killed it for me. He was a whiner and too interested in winning, and it just ruined that creative space and atmosphere I was able to participate in. When it came time to move across the country I sold my collection and haven't looked back much.

I messed around with a reboot version of the game using the Dark Ages RPG books as a guide. I still think that would be the way to go for the future, but as I said, the player base and the leadership want nothing to do with even the slightest hint of change or innovation. The game is perfect, didn't you know? (Cue eyeroll)

It's still my favorite game, but it needs to be rebuilt to be viable today. Anyone want to help me?

I would love to see a rebooted Jyhad/V:tes, but I spent a large chunk of my free time for two years working on a Kindred of the East expansion that never got published. Stu MacLeod wrote the rules and card text, and I taught myself Gimpshop so I could design cards and a whole new set of icons for Jyhad. I also looted a wide range of art and photos for placeholder images on the prototype set of roughly 400 cards. Stu lives in Australia, so our entire collaboration was done via email. Sadly, we submitted our prototype base set to White Wolf shortly before they pulled the plug on V:tes.

As mentioned above, Erik's post should be a front-page article and this discussion sub-thread should go with it.

For the first time in seven years, I played Space Hulk 3rd last night. My partially painted set is still gathering dust, as Delobius of F:AT brought his fully-painted set over. After a long day at work, I wasn't up for solving a puzzle, so I played the Genestealers. The scenario starts with five unconscious space marines in separate rooms, and two conscious space marines (one is the Librarian) need to rescue them. Or at least escape with three living space marines. I started with two blips and got two more blips every turn.

The Librarian kept throwing up psionic force fields to block key junctures, so it was a few turns before I could get close enough to attack. I got lucky and drew quite a few 3-blips early on, and I kept throwing sixes in combat. Delobius was even luckier and managed to survive most of my sixes, though he had a bad stretch where his guns jammed on nearly every shot during overwatch. He gave up on rescuing Sergeant Lorenzo and suffered bad command point draws as a result, but he did wake the marine with the flamer.

In the final stretch, the Librarian, the flamer, and one of his regular space marines just need two or three more turns to run down a straight section of corridor to escape. But there was an intersection where I had several Genestealers converging from either side. Tactical use of the flamer and the force fields controlled the intersection well and kept it clear, but a couple of Genestealers managed to slip through. The second one managed to kill the Librarian just after he ran out of psi points. In theory, the two space marines could have tried to go back to rescue either the Sergeant or the other space marine, but it seemed clear that they would have died trying, due to the swarm of lurking Genestealers.

Erik Twice wrote: Today I played a game I've long wanted to play and research for my writing: Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.


1) The game's core mechanism is the prey/predator system. You can only attack the player on your left and you are attacked by the player on your right. This doesn't seem clever, but it is. Normally in conflict games, when you fight you trade blows. Someone burns your granary, you kill their troops. Any advantage for you is a loss for your rival and any loss for your rival is a gain for you, because conflict is zero-sum and you are playing a two-player subgame.

Now, this is not true here. Here you can't nor want to attack the player who is attacking you. You want to defend against him and try to keep him from steamrolling you but te guy you want to beat sits to your left.

There are also a lot of cool subtleties about this. For example, you can tap all your vampires when defending against your predator, because your turn goes right after his. And you don't want to crush the player on your left because it would leave you defenseless against the player on your right.

Another amazing subtlety is the way you interact with all other players. I did not want my predator to do well, but I didn't want him to die, either, because otherwise the scary guy who is attacking him to win because I don't want to be his prey. And yuour prey's prey is a natural ally because you have a common enemy but he's also keeping your predator's predator in check.

I'm surprised nobody has copied this mechanism, it's that great.


5) Limited, zero-sum resources.

In V:TES you start with 30 blood and you lose the game if this total is reduced to 0. But these are not just life points, these tokens are also your money and you need to spend it in order to raise vampires and play some of the most powerful cards.

And that's a great mechanic. First, it means there's a very hard cap on what resources you can bring to the table, a sort of economic trade-off between survival and power. The more and bigger vampires you play, the less hits you can take and the more you need them while the less vampires you have, the more exposed your life total is. This is not a big deal early-on but in the late game the trade-offs become grueling.

In other words, this game builds a relationship between your life total, your available actions, your money and your board presnce. That's great and I can see much of the evolutive tree that would result in Netrunner here. Garfield games tend to be very concious about the way actions, draw and other basic facets work, which very few other designers pay as much attention to and which I think are a direct result of his maths background and study of traditional card games.

The game Savage Planet: Fate of Fantos directly lifted these things. Possibly more, im not familiar enough with VTES to know, but the designer did say that VTES was a huge direct influence on the design of Fantos. Its a set deck and you draft cards from a central market instead of building decks CCG style. It also has a system where one player who holds the favor of the gods can attack anyone not just their prey, and you can freely negotiate around this (or anything else). Its delivering from kickstarter in the US in the next week or so, and I'm pretty excited to see how it pans out. I mainly backed it because I had vague memories of playing VTES way back in the day and enjoying it, plus the art in Fantos was good enough that I wanted to support it just for that.

also, some games ive been playing recently. ive gotten onto an intense Knizia kick over the past however long. I realized after grabbing games to bring to game night last night that they were literally all Knizia games. im okay with it.


Past week or so:

Spectaculum: a Knizia stock market game i picked up for $6 at Ollie's recently and have been playing a ton. It has an absurd circus theme instead of the painfully obvious train theme that would make sense, but that aside I quite like it. The rules are simple enough that I can play it with my 9yo nephew and his nongamer dad and everyone has fun fun, but theres enough there to satisy more serious gamers as well. The visual representation of possible market fluctuations and the extremely limited amount of buying and selling shares you can do (2 shares bought or sold per turn) make timing your plays of when to get out of different stocks a tricky proposition. You want to stay in as long as things are trending up, but if you stay in too long and other people draw the right color discs they can pop your bubble real quick. Trying to ride that crest is a good source of tension, and can lead to some real devastating losses (which is always good fun as well).

Katzenjammer Blues: an old Knizia card game that has been on the table a lot lately. Its kind of a rummy variant with an auction. The main hooks are you can only score melds when you win an auction, and you bid on auctions with the cards that you are also trying to score, and there are a harshly limited number of points available to score (20 in lower player count games, and the hand ends when they run out). So you want to score fast, but winning auctions to enable scoring costs cards, and scoring also costs cards, so if you score too much too soon you are left unable to win auctions to score more for the rest of the hand. Quick and brutal, especially 2p. Really fun if you like traditional style card games. I haven't played with more than 3, but it seems like it would get way less good with more players.

Stephenson's Rocket: essentially Knizia's No Luck Acquire. You have the expanding companies on the board that merge when they run into each other and that you are vying for share majority of a la Acquire. You are also vying for majority of connected stations on the lines, and majority of goods from cities that lines hit (both individual city goods during the game, and majority of the various good types at the end of the game). You also have the classic Knizia "you get to do 2 things on your turn, which is the exact wrong number of things to get to do" turn structure. The heart of the game the Veto action. Any time anyone moves a train, anyone who has stock in that train can veto the proposed move. You then hold a once around auction (bidding with your shares in the train), and whoever wins the auction pays their shares and moves the train where they want it to move. Forcing people to give up their majority in companies to further their board position is a tricky and deliciously sticky puzzle. I've played once 4p and no one else liked it (too dry, no control, too mathy, "not fun"), but ive had a lot of success getting 2p games with a few people. Multiplayer seems largely about figuring out who is trying to do what and aligning your goals with them so you get maximum return with minimum effort (thats how it felt from my one play so far anyway). 2p is hugely different, since its a zero sum game and your opponent will never help further your goals if they can help it. The veto action is brutal, and if you're not careful you can let someone get a dominant position that you have no way of combating. Very interesting and tricky tactical choices. I could see it maybe getting a little scripted 2p if you played it enough times, since its the same setup each time, but I don't know if I'll be able to wrangle enough plays to get there.

Medici Vs. Strozzi: the 2p version of Medici. Maybe the most divisive game I've ever played. Its just numbers brutally grinding against numbers, and the base level of playing it kinda feels like doing math homework. I think its fascinating though. Each turn the player in control of the bag pulls 1-3 goods out of the bag. They then name a price for the goods. Either the other player pays the named price, or if they decline the person who named the price has to pay it. After someone pays the price they either load the goods onto one of their 3 boats and assign it to one of 3 harbors, or they throw the goods away (either if they don't want them, or if they won't fit onto one of their boats). Then whoever bought the goods pulls more tiles. Do this until either all the goods are gone from the bag, or one player fills all of their boats. You then pay out $20 for biggest boat at each of the three harbors, and adjust tug of war monopoly markers for the goods in each harbor and pay out money for each marker that ends up on your side of the midpoint (with bonus money if you peg each marker out at the end of your side of the track). Do this 3 times, and most money at the end wins. The baseline math homework part of the game is evaluating how much a given set of tiles is worth for you or your opponent, and figuring out the "correct" price. The interesting part is in determining a value for the intangibles. How many tiles should you pull? How much is control of the bag worth at any given point? How low can you name a price on something your opponent clearly doesn't want and still have them pass and let you buy it rather than paying to throw the stuff overboard? How much is it worth to overpay on a suboptimal bunch of tiles if it leaves you in a better or more flexible situation for the rest of the round? Is it it worth it to buy a single tile for $100, if letting your opponent buy it ends the round with their boats full and your boats almost totally empty? And on and on. I don't think I've ever played a game that more made you feel like everything you did was wrong. Any time your opponent buys something you named a price on it feels like you gave them a steal, and any time they pass it feels like you wasted a ton of money buying garbage. Also some people have a thematic disconnect in that I have yet to see a game where anyone ends up with more money than started with. The brutal zero sum nature of it forces you to spend money to keep your opponent from scoring more money though, and everyone is just constantly throwing their money into that fire. Anyway, if you like intense extremely mathy games its worth a look. I love it, and hopefully I'll find some repeat opponents sometime



Non Knizia

Through The Ages: A New Story Of Civilization: My dad and I used to play Terraforming Mars weekly, before we got turned onto TTA. We switched over and haven't looked back. You get the same tableau building engine building sort of feel, but the set decks and the way way tighter economy make it a much more compelling puzzle for us. Not sure theres much to be said about this one.

Everdell: played this at game night last night, and thought it was okay. Theres a giant deck of cards, and you're trying to dig through it and build your tableau of cards and set up combos and whatnot. The art is Grade A, but it definitely has some usability issues. The giant tree is eyecatching but blocks the entire board for one player if you're playing 4p. The text on the cards is tiny, which becomes an issue when you're trying to see what other people are up to and if they're going to steal the cards you're working towards. That being said, it was fun and I'd play it again. The timing of building up your tableau and triggering cards when you switch seasons was interesting.


Tomorrow I'm meeting a friend to play Gaia Project, Stephenson's Rocket, and Forbidden Stars. Looking forward to that session quite a bit.

Knizia definitely deserves his own category within board gaming. He was probably the first designer where I actively sought out more of his games to play.

I feel that way about Chvatil. I love most of his games. Through the Ages is fantastic. It also has a great app. for desktop or phone/tablet.

Forbidden Stars, man I've enjoyed that game when I've gotten a chance to play it.

Played a quick game of Confusion and 7 Wonders Dual with the wife.

Confusion is a Stronghold game which kinda flew under the radar some years back. A shame, it's a great semi-abstract with fantastic pieces and is likely impossible to find now. It's a hidden info abstract game where you know how your opponents pieces can move but not your own. Each turn you move, or try to move, a piece and your opponent lets you know if you can. The goal is to grab a football in the centre of the board and score with it.

At first I hated the game. The game was typically won by whatever player found a strong piece first and scored. It becomes much better in time - not among my favourite abstracts, but a great change in pace. The optional abilit chits are a must imo; the game is prone to the luck of early guesses and a strong starting position without them. Like Cosmic or many other games, it can just fall flat sometimes. These matches are thankfully quick!

7 Wonders Duel is alright. I sorta prefer it to the original game, the tight 2 player race is a bit more interactive. Seems to be growing a bit stale with repeated play though. Nothing too great, but scratches a gaming itch quickly with no fuss.

Got in a four-player game of Everdell. I had played this with my wife before and found it boring. Turns out two players is just too easy to do stuff. It's so much better with four. You need the board to be more crowded.

Enemy Coast Ahead by GMT is a solo game about the Dam Buster raids flown by the RAF in WW2. If you don't know, they thought it would be a good idea to blow up German dams but it was a tricky thing requiring an innovative type of rotating drum bomb released in a precise way. The game tries to simulate this.

It was a learning game so while it comes with a campaign game featuring the training of crews, flight across the channel and attacks on multiple dams, this scenario was small and just focused on the attack run of one Lancaster.

Too early to say if this is too much along the lines of B17 Queen of the Skies where you make one or two decisions and then spend 8 hours rolling on tables to see what happened or actually has some player agency. The attack run itself has some simple decisions such as to let the bomb go or to pull up and try again but not too much. Mostly charts.

So after fumbling through the charts and releasing my bomb and having it detonate and do enough damage to blow the dam, I had to check to see the fate of the bomber on it's return trip. Well, due to some horrible die rolls, the plane was shot down, everybody got killed except one dude who managed to bail out but he ended up getting captured and sent to a POW camp. Another horrible die roll resulted in him being shot while trying to escape. A further horrible roll resulted in Morning recon showing that I had not damaged the dam as much as had been thought and it was still standing.

The resolution phase made it a fun time. I'll have to see if playing the full game adds enough to make it worth while.




_{Which of these poor slobs get me as captain?}

Played Street Masters last night with my girlfriend. It was her first time. She used Megan and I had Ying Hua. Megan is a serious ass kicker. We played the Under Destruction stage, which involves running around managing time bombs. The villain was Dmitri.

We handled things pretty well, and had Dmitri down to 8 health, but he had a ton of gear and tactics cards and ultimately took us out. It was great!

Finished with a quick round of The Mind, which we hadn't played in a while. Got to level 6. Not bad.